The Future of Data Engineering

According to Hired’s State of Software Engineers report, average salaries for data engineers increased 7% in New York and 6% in the Bay area, vs. an average of 3.5% for the rest of Americans.

Here are the salary studies on Data Engineers —

Salary Study Data Engineer Salaries
Glassdoor 2022 Median - $102,472
Average - $137,776
Range - $110,000 - $155,000
Robert Half 2022 Salary Guide $120,000 - $222,000
Payscale.com 2022 Average - $69,996
Range - $65,000 - $145,000
Dice Salary Report 2022 $76,500 - $221,500

So, You Want to be a Data Engineer? points out that you set your focus on big data analysis. Data engineers set up the data architectures and the data pipelines for the data analysis to take place.

Data engineers are vested with readying the data pipelines and mainly focus on top 3 high-level areas:

  • Building and maintaining the data platform/data infrastructure.
  • Data wrangling and ETL/ELT pipelining.
  • Enabling and training others in the data team and the wider organization.

Emerging Trends in Data Engineering:

There has been a significant shift toward “real-time data pipelines and real-time data processing systems, as we move from batch-oriented data movement and processing to real-time data movement and processing

The data warehouse, with its tremendous flexibility to house data marts, data lakes, or simple data sets based on need, has become very popular lately. explains how database streaming technology is preparing the future of highly scalable, real-time business analytics.

Essentially, Data Engineers manage the core foundation on how the data of the company is structured in the data warehouse. Tasks range from designing table structures to building ETL/ELT pipelines to ensure a scalable, high-performance infrastructure to satisfy all data needs of the company.

The future of data engineers:

Data Engineering seems to be a promising career for the next 5 years, as hundreds of data sources are emerging day by day. Nowadays, all major companies are looking for data engineers. Apart from that many IT companies are providing data services to major tech giants, which leads to a high job opportunity for a data engineer in the upcoming future. In a short while, this has become one of the highest paying jobs and it will remain the same in the upcoming years.

Below are some very concrete high-level examples that data-driven organizations will utilize for a data engineering team:

  • Data quality (amount of known or unknown data failures and anomalies that impact downstream teams or applications).
  • Time-to-production (how long does it take to productionize new data sources and data streams).
  • Data uptime (% of the time a dataset is delivered on time, relative to e.g., the expected frequency or mutually agreed SLA requirements).